Thursday 7 June 2012

jubilant lee

No post yesterday as it was bonkers at work.

It was a pretty pointless long weekend, if I'm honest.

I have somewhat mixed feelings over the Royal Family.  A part of me isn't a fan of the fact we spend a hell of a lot of money on a family that happens to be royal simply through the luck of birth.

Another part of me thinks that if it was replaced by a president they'd end up having the money spent on them or the politicians would find some other way to waste it.  And besides, the royals bring in a huge amount of tourist money and they do go around doing stuff that their royal status gives them special benefits to achieve.

I think my only real issue with them is the way in which we still treat them.  There are a lot of people in the UK who still regard them as being special in some way or that they count for something.  The deferential attitude is the only thing that really annoys me about them.

In terms of the actual jubilee it seemed to be a bit of a wash out locally.  It pretty much rained or drizzled all the weekend and the temperature took a severe nosedive which seemed to mean nothing much happened.

The planned events were not really my cup of tea on the whole.  There was a pageant where 1,000 boats went down the Thames, a concert and then a ceremony of thanksgiving.

I tried to watch the pageant, but the coverage was terrible.  It was like watching a hugely extended version of the one show and I hate the one show.  I only managed about an hour and then had to switch it off.

The concert I learned my lesson and recorded ait and then watched it on a massive delay.  This allowed me to skip the bits where people introduced the acts (they were cringe worthy) and also skip some of the songs that just weren't my cup of tea.

It seemed like they'd had a fair old go at representing all sorts of different types of music, which was fair enough, but meant good chunks of it weren't my cup of tea.  But overall it sort of worked.

I didn't even go near the ceremony thing.

Otherwise I did very little.  I watched a whole bunch of TV shows, many of which I'd recorded - the fourth series of Being Human in particular.

I wasn't a big fan of the third series of Being Human.  It got quite introspective and naval gazing and it seemed to lose its sense of humour, which was the thing that always really appealed to me.

The fourth series was a real return to form.  In particular the plot which was spread across all the episodes really worked well, which it kinda didn't in season 3.  In 3 it didn't feel like there was a proper overall plan where there clearly was in 4.

I have to say though that it seemed to wrap up really well but then they said at the end there was going to be a series 5, so I'm a little trepidatious about how good 5 will be.